CNN talks to a woman who's staked out overnight for an application.
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(Newser)
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A mob of 30,000 people swarmed over an Atlanta parking lot in a heat wave yesterday, clamoring for an application to get on a waiting list for Section 8 housing assistance. Fights broke out, and children were reportedly trampled, with police stepping in to stop the onslaught, according to the Huffington Post. Many had waited in line for days. “People are passing out,” one woman told CNN. “For a minute, I thought I was gonna lose my life in the crowd.”

Only 13,000 applications were actually handed out, and few of those will do much good; the city only has 455 vouchers, and the agency stressed that none were available. By 7:30 this morning about 50 had lined up to hand in their applications early, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Police even formed a drive-through lane, allowing applicants to drop their forms without leaving their cars. “Today, we are accommodating the crowd,” said the Housing Authority’s executive director.

This incident is another example of the distortions in the U.S. economy. There are 4 million new houses sitting vacant distributed all over the country. Those houses were vastly oversized to increase the profits of the developers and that increased the monthy costs of the mortgages that were issued on those properties (that in turn generated higher fees for all the companies that get a percentage of the closing costs.) At the same time, there are hundreds-of-thousands families homeless and many others who most of their income goes to pay rent. The root cause of this is that the jobs available to the majority of Americans (Target cashier, Fed Ex driver) do not pay enough to cover much beyond food and rent: www.patriotsforamerica.ning.com/profiles/blogs/unemployment-blues?xg_source=activity

Fascist_Jack

Aug 12, 2010 7:12 PM CDT

There are two types of minorities in this country, conservative ones and liberal ones. Conservative minorities, like a lot of Indians, Chinese and Japanese, tend to have their own businesses here and commit little to no crime. Liberal minorities, like Blacks and Mexicans, tend to live off of government hand outs and pretty much account for the majority of inmates in prison. And this is coming from a Black man saying this, so save the accusations of racism for a White poster.